Enlarge / A crop monitoring robot: Like a Roomba, but with more sensors and responsibility. (credit: Megan Geuss)

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD—Last week's ARPA-E summit was full of big ideas about the future of energy, and nowhere was that more evident than on the summit's show floor. In the basement of the sprawling Gaylord Hotel and Convention Center, dozens of academic institutions and companies set up booths to show off what they had been working on with their grant money.

From cars to recycling to electricity-generating turbines to biofuels, the warehouse temporarily turned into a montage of earl-stage ideas. Most importantly, it also showed off the breadth of ARPA-E's work: though the Department of Energy's early-stage grant program has at times been cast as an accelerator for renewable energy exclusively, ARPA-E projects span a variety of fuels and even include some non-energy projects whose application could save industry a significant amount of energy.

The price of ether, the cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network, has fallen below $500 for the first time this year. The decline comes days after a senior official from the Securities and Exchange Commission acknowledged that the agency had "dozens" of open investigations into initial coin offerings. The price of ether has fallen 19 percent in the last 24 hours, from $580 to $470.

“We’re doing obviously a lot in the crypto space, and we’re seeing a lot in the crypto space,” said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC's Enforcement Division, at a conference on Thursday. “We are very active, and I would just expect to see more and more."

The SEC's decision to aggressively police cryptocurrency offerings is particularly significant for the Ethereum community because many new cryptocurrency offerings are built on top of the Ethereum platform. People creating a new token on the Ethereum blockchain need to buy ether, the currency used to pay for Ethereum transactions. So if aggressive SEC enforcement ends the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom—which seems to be cooling anyway—it would remove a major factor that pushed ether's value upward during 2017.

Three new studies suggest that early humans in East Africa started doing much more complex things—making more sophisticated tools, trading with neighboring groups for better stone, and maybe even using symbols to communicate—in order to survive rapid climate shifts 320,000 ago. Those findings may support the theory that bigger social networks, more complicated tool-making technology, and symbolic thinking helped drive early humans to evolve larger brains by the Middle Pleistocene, around 200,000 years ago.

But that kind of development doesn't just happen. Brains are expensive organs to maintain, in terms of the energy required to keep them nourished and oxygenated, and that size upgrade would have come at a cost. To succeed, bigger brains would have to offer enough of a survival advantage to outweigh the extra burdens they entail.

For that to be the case, humans' ability to survive and reproduce would have to depend on the things we might need such a big brain for, like communicating with lots of other humans in more complex ways or making and using more complex tools. That's why many paleoanthropologists have suggested that the kinds of cultural developments we see in Middle Stone Age sites in East Africa could have been responsible. Cultural development, in other words, drove the physical evolution of our brains in a really major way.

AUSTIN, Texas—If you've ever asked yourself how long a Black Mirror episode might take to turn into real life, the new documentary People's Republic of Desire has an answer: roughly four years.

Really, the best way to describe this feature-length look at Chinese Internet streamers is to point to the British series' first-season episode "Fifteen Million Merits," which aired in 2011 and starred Get Out's Daniel Kaluuya. The episode imagined a future, Internet-driven popularity contest that tore people's lives apart. According to the filmmakers behind People's Republic of Desire, that episode's level of life-bending insanity had already unfolded in China by 2015, fueled largely by the millions-strong video-sharing site YY. And the results aren't pretty.

The result, with its millimeter-range focus on major YY personalities, deservedly won this week's South by Southwest jury prize for best documentary. Though it leaves some questions and topics unexplored, People's Republic of Desire still delivers a fascinating, character-driven story that Internet fans in the West should pay particular heed to—especially as live-streaming services develop and mature on our side of the Pacific.

After roughly three years of commercial viability, virtual reality seems to have excelled within a different realm than the one I typically wonder about: the film festival. Events like Sundance, Tribeca, and South By Southwest already overflow with weird, not-quite-accessible films about real-world drama, emotions, and nonsensical stories. And today, the only venue that fits those works better than arthouse theaters, quite frankly, is the ornate, vision-filling VR headset.

But filmmakers aren't just descending onto hardware like HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and Samsung GearVR in a boring, flash-in-the-pan manner. At SXSW 2018 in particular, they're finally exhibiting a proficiency in two equally important extremes: what VR can sell that normal films cannot, and what VR must compromise or let go of for the sake of a better film experience.

I went eyes-on with nearly two dozen VR experiences at SXSW 2018, and I'll be honest, some of them were rough. Some filmmakers still think that a 360-degree video that forces viewers to crane their neck and hunt around for content is a good idea (geez, please stop making those). Others packed far too much visual noise or too many unnecessary interactions into a 3D world that never answered the important question of why its content and message was better in VR than on a flat screen.

50 million profiles leaked and ‘politically weaponized’ against US voters

Analysis Facebook has “suspended” any business with controversial analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its holding company, following claims by CA’s former director that the social media ad slinger’s data was purloined and used for political dirty tricks.…

50 million profiles leaked and ‘politically weaponized’ against US voters

Analysis Facebook has “suspended” any business with Cambridge Analytica and its holding company following claims by CA’s former director that the social media ad slinger’s data was purloined and used for political dirty tricks.…